PHP software

I picked up a book on PHP that seems pretty good as a learning book and reference material.

Problem is, they don't state the software you need to test your code!!

I've got Tomcat on my system as a webserver, but what else do I need to be able to run and test my PHP code?

Note: The book goes into depth into XML technologies: SAX, DOM, XPath, and XSLT. Software to run these scripts would be nice too.

(a web page tutorial for intro to PHP and setting up your system to use it would be great, first and foremost)

>>11
PHP is easy to learn to do crap with (yet you still need to be a decent coder if you want to get things done the right way, as with any other language). But this great learning curve is, perhaps, what makes PHP get so many newbies and script kiddies writing crap, and this gave the language a bad fame among other language fanbois and short-sighted people.

Any programmer who can do C or Python (and Perl - but Perl has a similar problem to PHP), can write pretty dencent PHP code that doesn't suck and is maintainable and scalable. In fact, it's much more maintainable than Perl and Java, and that's why some companies are adopting it, besides the ease of development. Criticizing PHP becuase there are bad programmers using it is asinine.

As for namespaces I have 4 things to say:
1. C lived without them for decades. And most serious stuff is written in C.
2. Proper software doesn't need them, and if you're not writing proper software, don't complain. Use function prefixes, and don't abuse global variables. These are good practices even with namespaces.
3. PHP is, for now, not intended to write colossally large applications, you know. Blaming it for this is like blaming an Avensis for not reaching 320 Km/h.
4. I wish this gets fixed soon. Not only I'd like to have more language constructs, but I'd love to see fan(g?)boys losing their primary, favorite, ever used bitching point and STFU.